MUZAFFARABAD: Pakistan shut offices and arrested scores of activists of an Islamic charity, officials said yesterday, as international pressure mounted for firm action against militants blamed for the Mumbai attacks. The overnight raids came after Pakistan said it would abide by a UN decision placing Hafiz Saeed, founder of the Lashkar-e-Taiba group, on its terrorism sanctions list of people and organizations linked to Al-Qaeda and the Taleban.
Pakistan said it was investigating links with the Mumbai attacks, but that India has not provided any evidence. “Our own investigations cannot proceed beyond a certain point without provision of credible information and evidence pertaining to the Mumbai attacks,” Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi said in a televised statement early yesterday. Pakistan also rounded up some of the 40 people India has demanded be extradited. Saeed, who founded Lashkar in 1990 and officially left the group in 2001, has been put under house arrest, according to one of his spokesmen.
Three associates were also added to the UN list and will be subject to sanctions freezing assets and restricting travel, but a Pakistani TV news channel reported one of them was dead.
An intelligence official said that Maulana Masood Azhar, head of the Jaish-e-Muhammad group, was also detained. One close aide of Azhar’s said: “I think they could have detained him to relieve pressure, but I don’t know the exact whereabouts of the Maulana.”
In the Pakistani Kashmir capital Muzaffarabad, police raided an office, two schools and a religious seminary run by Jamaat-ud-Dawa (JuD), a charity regarded as a Lashkar front.
The UN has put the JuD on its terrorist list too. Hundreds of supporters and people who recalled JuD’s work during an earthquake in Kashmir in 2005 protested the raids.
“Pakistan should revisit its policy of bowing before international pressure immediately, without regard for the pros and cons of its actions,” Maulana Abdul Aziz Alvi, JuD’s head in Pakistani Kashmir, said from house arrest.
Police raided JuD offices elsewhere in Pakistani Kashmir, as well as in several cities including Multan, Bahawalpur, Rahim Yar Khan, Lahore, Karachi and Quetta. A Jamaat spokesman said 100 workers were arrested in North West Frontier Province alone.
